The monster heads

We are delighted to report that we recently received our 100,000th view on the many-headed monster! We would like to thank everyone who reads the blog, as well as all those who share posts with others, or who take the time to comment. It is safe to say we wouldn’t be here without you.

The monster celebrates like it is 1566.

We usually mark milestones with some reflection, so here goes:

The monster’s first post appeared 18 July 2012 (so we will soon be 3 years old as well). Mark Hailwood and Brodie Waddell were the founding members, soon joined by Laura Sangha and Jonathan Willis. Since then we’ve:

• Posted 167 blogs
• Had 48,500 visitors
• Featured 11 mini-series
• Received 766 comments

Our most successful post is now Brodie’s ‘A missing child and a suspicious meat pie in 1645’, relating the strange case of human flesh allegedly being sold as food. After being featured on the suspiciously named Hacker News, this post received an astonishing 4,857 views (4,246 visitors) on 2 June 2015.

Beyond that, a good proportion of our hits still come from our History from Below Online Symposium which has received more than 5,000 views. Not only was the event itself very popular, it continues to provoke discussion and we know has become a useful teaching resource for many.

Given its success, this year we will be hosting another online symposium following the same format. ‘The Voices of the People’ is intended to allow us to uncover and listen to our more humble ancestors, those non-elites whose presence is often much harder to detect in the historical record. Beginning in July, it will feature papers from around 15 scholars working in the early modern and modern periods, each reflecting on how they encounter the Voices of the People in their own research.

July 2015: The Voices of the People will be heard!

Finally, here are some of the more entertaining search terms that have directed people to the monster (and the posts we assume are the link):

• harry potter and the bible summary [History and Analogy, Part I]
• history of the clown island methodology [from our tagline: the history of ‘the unruly sort of clowns’]
• Monster cocks [The Woolcomber’s World, Part IV: Births, deaths, marriages and fighting cocks]
• hydra brodie waddell [because of Brodie’s resemblance to a mythical serpent]
• tortures horrible [Samuel Clarke’s Martyrology: images of religious violence]
• boneless part in human body [Norwich Entertainments, Part I: A monstrous hairy child and a boneless girl]
• a naked monster alone showing long panni erected [???]

Thanks again, and keep readin’ ‘n’ tweetin’ folks…